Government Agency Scraps Employee Ratings To Avoid ‘Discrimination’

One government agency has decided that the results of employee ratings are too discriminatory, and eliminated the process entirely. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on Monday that it will now award all employees the highest rating regardless of performance reviews.

The CFPB, which oversees transactions in the financial sector for the federal government, decided to no longer conduct employee reviews because there were just too many apparent “significant disparities” between the races, ages, and locations of its employees.

According to American Banker, this new policy is set to cost over $5 million dollars, as it will now pay employees as if they received the highest evaluation score. The previous system ranked staff on their performance from a scale ranging from one to five, with five being the best score a CFPB staffer could receive after a review of their work on the job.

This development comes right before the agency is scheduled for a Wednesday hearing to investigate allegations that it practiced retaliatory actions towards certain employees. News reports have circulated that the alleged “discriminations” were race-based and that the CFPB implemented their new policies to alleviate that problem.

CFPB Director Richard Cordray explained in a staff email that the change was apparently not related to the previous race-based allegations.

“”We have determined that there were broad-based disparities in the way performance ratings were assigned across our employee base in both 2012 and 2013,” Cordray stated in the email. “These differences indicate a systemic disadvantage to various categories of employees that persisted across divisions, offices, and other employee characteristics.”

Some have found this new policy to be misguided and believe it to be an overcorrection that will ultimately punish top performers in the department.

“Treating the agency’s highest-rated employees the same as its lowest-rated ones is the opposite of fairness, Thomas Brown, a columnist for Bankstocks.com, wrote in a Wednesday piece lambasting the decision. “Hard-working, conscientious workers (and, yes, the federal government does have those) deserve to be treated better and paid more than workers who, say, persistently show up late and turn in shoddy work.”

“Instead, in its pathetic bow to political correctness, the slackers are being rewarded,” Brown continued. “Worse, Cordray seems oblivious to the fact that he’s giving his most valuable workers the shaft.”